This invention relates to cheese-making, and is concerned more particularly with the formation of blocks of compressed natural cheese from cheese curd.
An increasing volume of cheese is being manufactured commercially by crumbling cheese curd in a mill, mixing the curd with salt, compressing the prepared curd to expel whey and air and cause the particles of curd to fuse together and form a block of natural cheese, wrapping the block in impervious sheet material, and then maturing the cheese under pressure. Previously the conventional method of forming the prepared cheese curd into blocks of natural cheese was by compressing the curd in individual moulds, but the filling, weighing, compressing and emptying of each mould is a time-consuming operation, and a large number of moulds and presses are required for large scale production.
In U.S. Pat. No. 3,468,026 there is described and claimed a method of compressing crumbled cheese curd to consolidate the curd into cheese blocks, comprising forming the crumbled curd into a pillar in a chamber maintained at a sub-atmospheric pressure whereby air introduced with the curd is "flashed-off" and the curd in the pillar is free of air pockets, the curd in the lower portion of the pillar being compressed by the weight of superimposed curd to press out whey therefrom and consolidate the curd, removing the whey from the chamber, feeding crumbled curd into the chamber and onto the top of the pillar, lowering the pillar in the chamber and severing the lower end of the pillar to form a block of cheese, and removing the block of cheese from the chamber. The apparatus described in the above mentioned specification for carrying out this method comprises a hollow column mounted in the chamber, the pillar of curd being formed by filling the inside of the column with crumbled curd and the pillar being lowered by first supporting the pillar on a platform and then lowering the platform to slide the lower end of the pillar out of the column. The top of the chamber is fitted with an airlock for feeding the crumbled curd into the chamber when the chamber is at a sub-atmospheric pressure. In the operation of this apparatus it was found that the frictional resistance between the pillar of curd and the walls of the column was sometimes high enough to cause fractures in the pillar when it was lowered in the column.